Warnock becomes the first black senator elected in the southern state, while a second seat remains at stake in a very close scrutiny
The vote counting of the crucial Senate elections in Georgia , which will decide the majority of the upper house, and therefore, will mark the new administration of Joe Biden , has advanced in an increasingly tight scrutiny into the early hours of Wednesday. After 2:00 (8:00 in mainland Spain), with 97% scrutinized, the media projected the winner of the Democrat Raphael Warnock. The reverend made history by becoming the first black senator elected in the southern territory and brought his party closer to the majority of the House. If the two Democratic candidates win, the Senate will be made up of 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats (two of them, independents), but the next vice president, Kamala Harris, will exercise the deciding vote in cases of tie. Republicans need to win the seat that is still up for grabs in the state to maintain control of the upper house, which they have enjoyed for six years, and which would force Biden to reach deals with the opposition to advance his political agenda.
Warnock has won with 50.4% of the votes to Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler (49.5%). The second seat up for grabs is disputed by documentary filmmaker Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, and David Perdue, who was senator from Georgia until Sunday. Ossoff leads Purdue by less than a tenth, according to AP figures. The four candidates exceed two million votes. The tight races – which is why the outcome is prolonged – take place after in November no one managed to exceed 50% of the support needed to win one of the two seats at stake. The authorities have reported that at noon (six in the afternoon in mainland Spain) the official results could be released.
“It looks like they are putting together a big ‘voter dump’ against the Republican candidates. Are you waiting to see how many votes they need? ” Outgoing President Donald Trump wrote on his Twitter account, hinting without evidence that Democrats want to rig the election.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, reported late at night that nearly 200,000 votes and ballots sent by the military posted abroad were yet to be counted, which can be received until Friday at noon.
The election was held in a climate of high tension, after a campaign marked by Trump’s offensive , to annul the result of the presidential elections, waving unfounded accusations of massive fraud, which involve questioning the entire system. Georgia was in the eye of the hurricane having chosen Biden, thus becoming the only blue oasis in the so-called “biblical belt” of the South, in close scrutiny that Trump has tried to discredit without success.
Before polling stations opened on Tuesday, more than three million Georgians (out of about 7.7 million registered) had already voted early or by mail, an unprecedented number in a second round to allocate Senate seats. . Early votes, which tend to favor Democrats, have been the first to be scrutinized. Therefore, as the ballots for this Tuesday have been counted, his advantage was narrowing. Then, with the results of some progressive majority counties, the picture has changed again.
In the November presidential elections , five million exercised their right to vote, with the mobilization of the African-American community and young people being the key to Biden’s narrow triumph, who managed to defeat Trump in the conservative fiefdom by less than 12,000 votes. Georgia had not voted for a Democratic president in 28 years. Nor has he elected a senator from that party since 1994. Democratic hope is in Atlanta and the suburbs, the progressive core of the state, which in the last decade has spread at great speed, jeopardizing the established Republican hegemony in the rural area.
This Wednesday, the certification of Biden as the winner of the presidential elections in a bicameral session on Capitol Hill is set and a group of Republican senators and congressmen plans to torpedo by presenting objections, although they lack votes for the protest to translate into some setback in the certification of Biden as president, a formality prior to his inauguration on January 20.
The figure of Trump has planned on this election. First, because of the pressure he has exerted against the Republicans who have not followed the chant of electoral fraud, signaling them as disloyal to the Party. And, second, because these elections have been a test for Republicans, a test for their seductive capacity without the figure of the president involved.
One of the doubts that will be cleared when the official results of Georgia are known is how much – and if for better or for worse – the rhetoric of the outgoing president about the reliability of the electoral system weighed. Trump has spent two months denouncing without evidence that there was fraud in the elections last November and, in turn, inviting his bases to come out and vote for the two Republican candidates. According to second-round exit polls conducted by The Washington Post , nearly nine out of 10 Georgia Democrats said the November elections were fair, while only two out of 10 Republicans claimed the same.
The latest scandal related to Trump’s unprecedented crusade was the telephone call published last Sunday in which the president pressured Georgia’s Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to reverse the victory of Biden. Democratic voters outside of the polling stations were fed up with the outgoing president’s polemics and hoped for the triumph of his senatorial candidates to begin writing a new chapter in political history. Jerald Hogan, 46, was confident in the overturning of the conservative state: “For the first time in my life I think things are going to change.”